This article was originally published in Spanish in the website of Fundación madri+d. To access the original version, click here.The English translation was published in OpenMind, an interdisciplinary platform with bilingual articles in Spanish and English by te Fundación BBVA. The English version is here.
On the name of the satellites of Jupiter discovered by Galileo
Miguel de Cervantes died in 1616 a pauper. He is buried in the convent Trinitarians nuns in Madrid, where there is a search now underway for his tomb. As well as his monumental work Don Quixote, which he himself considered the first modern novel, his extensive... read more ❯

August this year 2012, the scientific community is celebrating the 100 years of 'cosmic ray' discovery. I will not give much on how it's discovered since already covered on other articles, such as this, this and this. Instead i only discuss about the contribution from a laboratorium in Java, and how the result helping on paving the way to the study of the cosmic ray.
The modern view of cosmic ray study can be seen because of important contribution from experiment of Victor Hess in 1912, using balloon to study the atmosphere and its relation to the electricity. The work of Hess... read more ❯

I have watched a very interesting movie last weekend: "Ágora", by the Spanish-Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar. It is a story about a very interesting character, the astronomer Hypatia, who live in the IV-V centuries, during the end of the Roman empire. We know for sure few things about her life and death. She was killed during by Christian zelots during these turbulent years, when paganism (and the classical culture) was dying, and a new order and way of understanding the world was appearing
As a matter of fact, I do not care whether the story in the movie is accurate... read more ❯

Hello,
If you live in the US or can watch PBS from your country, you should know that a film by Interstellar Studios to commemorate 400 Years of the Telescope is premiering this week.
Here are the KQED and KQED Hi Def schedule:
Tuesday, April 14 — 09:00pm
Wednesday, April 15 — 03:00am
Wednesday, April 15 — 08:00pm 0189 - KQED Life-Encore
Thursday, April 16 — 02:00am 0189 - KQED Life-Encore
Sunday, April 19 — 07:00pm 0009
Monday, April 20 — 01:00am 0009
A description of the movie can be found on their web site.
Preview of the movie which will give you a flavor of the quality of... read more ❯

"Nasir rolled over on his back, with my glasses, and began to study the stars, counting aloud first one group and then another; crying out with surprise at discovering little lights not noticed by his unaided eye. Auda set us on to talk of telescopes - of the great ones - and of how man in three hundred years had so far advanced from his first essay that now he built glasses as long as a tent, through which he counted thousands of unknown stars. 'And the stars - what are they?' We slipped into talk of suns beyond suns,... read more ❯

The immobility of the Earth, the condemnation of the copernican theory and the tribulations of Galileo

“…Give me the ships, with adapted sails to the heavenly wind; there will be fearless people , even if they face the immensity. And for those descendants who in short time will venture themselves by these ways we will prepare, oh Galileo, myself a lunar astronomy and you a jovian one.” Johannes Kepler to Galileo Galilei in “Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo”
This year we celebrate, among other facts, the fourth centennial since Galileo Galilei used for the first time a rudimentary telescope to observe the sky and, doing so, to open a new universe to humankind. So, as a... read more ❯

Hello,
Reading my previous posts in this blog, I realize that you may have the feeling that my life is all about astronomy... it is mostly true especially right now (!), but I still have interest in other subjects than the stars and the planets. I am very found of history in general and I tried to watch, read, listen podcast/video/books about this subject. This morning while coming to work, I listened to a podcast about the Pharaoh called Akhenathen. We know that the Ancient Egypt had various pharaohs so why this one deserves more interest than any others? Well Akhenathen was apparently the... read more ❯